Music

Spotify now makes it easy to take all Your Music for offline listening

Christian Zibreg ∙ June 2, 2014

Spotify, the top subscription music service, today gave its iOS streaming app a minor update improving the way you can manage and enjoy your music when without an Internet connection. According to the Swedish startup, you can now go to the Songs tab to tell the app to synchronize all the tracks inside the Your Music section for offline listening. Previously, you had to mark songs for offline listening by starring them or waste time creating and managing playlists.

Spotify for the iPhone and iPad is free in the App Store...

Read More

Broadcast radio stations and locally targeted ads reportedly planned for iTunes Radio

Christian Zibreg ∙ May 30, 2014

According to The Information, a technology blog run by the former Wall Street Journal star reporter Jessica Lessin, Apple is about to bring broadcast radio stations to its iTunes Radio service and permit advertisers to target listeners with greater granularity than before.

These latest strides, said to materialize later this year, are believed to be aimed squarely at the likes of Pandora as Apple moves to make its service more competitive versus established Internet radio offerings...

Read More

Google Play Music adds Downloaded Only filter, playlist editing, Shuffle Artist and more

Christian Zibreg ∙ May 29, 2014

Google's iOS client for its Play Music service has received a little update today bringing a few useful enhancement to make the experience better and less frictionless. For starters, the new Google Play Music version 1.2.1.1787 has removed a major annoyance: you can now finally edit playlists on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. Needless to say, any changes made to a playlist on one device instantly reflect on all your others.

And when sorting through your cloud music library, the app now makes it dead simple to filter only the tracks that you've downloaded to your device for offline listening. There are two other additions, explained after the break.

Google Play Music is free in the App Store...

Read More

Complete Me Not: remove the ‘Complete My Album’ button from the stock Music app

Jeff Benjamin ∙ Updated April 17, 2018

The Complete My Album button in the stock Music app is found for incomplete albums that you purchased via iTunes. For example, if you download one or two popular songs from an artist, Apple will try to up-sell you (for lack of a better word) the rest of the album using a convenient button.

I wrote all about the Complete My Album feature in our ultimate Music App guide, so I recommend you check that out to learn more. But if you already know how Complete My Album works, then you know why Complete Me Not would be a handy tweak to have at your disposal. Take a look at our video walkthrough after the break for all of the details.

Read More

Apple paid $500M for Beats Music, $2.5B for Beats hardware (and other tidbits)

Christian Zibreg ∙ May 29, 2014

According to a breakdown of Apple's $3 billion Beats buy published Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, the company basically paid less than $500 million for the Beats Music subscription service and about $2.5 billion for Beats Electronics LCC, which makes the popular Beats headphones, speakers and audio software (which some dismiss as a software equalizer that boosts the bass).

The report alleges that the acquisition - the most expensive in Apple's history - gives the Cupertino firm Beats' brand power and star leadership. The story downplays the importance of the generic Beats Music streaming service to the overall deal...

Read More

Rdio gains push notifications

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2018

Rdio has updated its free radio streaming app for the iPhone and iPad with some bug fixes and a brand new, albeit long overdue, feature: push notifications. That's right, you can now elect to received push alerts for various social activities going on in your stream.

The Internet radio app offers a catalog of 25 million songs and now you can get notified when someone shares a song with you, follows you on the service, subscribes to your playlist and more.

Push alerts settings are granular so you can choose to receive alerts for specific events and mute alerts for the others. For example, you could tell Rdio to send notifications to your device only for new songs shared with you...

Read More

iTunes Radio set to stream a bunch of ESPN and NPR stations

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 26, 2016

Apple sure seems adamant to bolster up its music ambitions. Shortly after confirming that it's purchasing Beats Electronics and Beats Music in a transaction valued at $3 billion - by far the largest acquisition in company history since the 1997 NeXT deal, we're now hearing some encouraging news concerning iTunes Radio, its Internet radio service.

Specifically, iTunes Radio has now started streaming content from ESPN, including the World Cup stream. Moreover, Apple will be adding a bunch of local NPR stations to the service soon...

Read More

Beats Music drops annual subscription fee to $99, free trial extended to 14 days for everyone

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 27, 2018

Hot on the heels of officially announcing the major $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics LCC., and ahead of its SVP Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi's joint appearance at the Code Conference tonight, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre's four months old music service has just sweetened the deal.

The startup has dropped the price of Beats Music yearly subscription free to $99.99, down from $119.88.

Additionally, the previous 7-day free trial of Beats Music has now been extended in a “no strings attached” move to fourteen days to all users...

Read More

Chart of the day: why Apple must buy Beats or build own subscription music product

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated June 16, 2016

Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty released an interesting chart highlighting the need for an Apple-branded on-demand music streaming product. Currently, the company only sells individual songs or whole albums on iTunes.

The analyst worryingly writes in a note to clients issued Wednesday that iTunes sales are down 24 percent year-on-year. Moreover, Apple's 800 million iTunes users are spending an average of $3.29 on iTunes.

For the sake of clarity, the figure represents combined per-user purchases of music, movies, iOS and Mac apps and more. That being said, Apple is clearly taking a heat due to its refusal to introduce a subscription music service because iTunes users seem to spending more on apps and less on music nowadays...

Read More

DefaultSpot makes Spotify the default music player on iPhone

Joe Rossignol ∙ Updated April 17, 2023

Spotify is one of the most popular cross-platform streaming music services, with over 40 million active users worldwide. While I am out of luck using the service as a Canadian, our neighbors to the south and elsewhere can benefit from a jailbreak tweak called DefaultSpot. The simple iOS extension sets Spotify as the default music player on iPhone, and also integrates with the Control Center playback controls.

Read More

iTunes Radio could expand to The Netherlands

Christian Zibreg ∙ May 23, 2014

Based on a pair of screenshots of the iOS 7 Music app shared on Twitter, it seems that The Netherlands has made it on Apple's list of upcoming iTunes Radio markets in Europe as one Dutch user reports the Radio tab randomly appearing and disappearing on his device.

Last we heard, Apple was gearing up to expand the service to the United Kingdom following a meeting its iAd director had with London-based ad agencies.

The Cupertino company even banned London-based iTunes Radio rival, a service called Bloom.fm, from its iAd advertising network...

Read More